CCRi in collaboration with Google, Inc., has announced the initial release of GeoMesa for Google Cloud Bigtable.
GeoMesa is an open-source system that quickly stores, indexes, and queries hundreds of billions of geospatial features in a distributed (i.e. cloud) database.

GeoMesa’s novel indexing strategy effectively distributes the data across, utilizing the full processing power of the cloud for writing and querying. This index keys on both spatial and temporal attributes to support mapping and analytical functions. GeoMesa’s innovative approach makes it the leading open-source solution for storing big spatial data in the cloud.

Distributed databases already enable developers to store “big data” in the cloud, but without a spatial adapter like GeoMesa, they cannot effectively take advantage of the inherent spatial attributes of the data. GeoMesa works on top of distributed data stores to facilitate spatial analysis. This means developers can query for events that occurred within 4 miles of a location, for example, or within the bounds of a specific polygon (e.g. inside the state of Virginia).

GeoMesa supports the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards so developers can easily migrate existing systems or build new systems on top of GeoMesa. Developers familiar with GeoServer or the OpenGeo Suite can use the GeoMesa plugin to add new data stores backed by Google Cloud Bigtable.

By using Google Cloud Bigtable to back GeoMesa, developers are freed from the need to stand up and maintain complex cloud computing environments. These environments are not only expensive to build, but they require highly-trained DevOps Engineers to maintain them and grow them as the data accumulates.

CCRi is a data science corporation focused on designing and implementing sophisticated analytical tools to answer important questions for its clients. CCRi also offers professional support packages to stand-up and support GeoMesa. GeoMesa is an open-source system offered through the Eclipse Foundation’s LocationTech Working group. For more information on GeoMesa, see www.geomesa.org. For more information on Google Cloud Bigtable, see http://cloud.google.com/bigtable.